The Longest Romance

by Humberto Fontova

  Eusebio Mujal, lifelong labor leader and ex-Communist, instantly recognized Matthews’s agitprop, quickly showed him the door, and refused to take his calls or accept his messages from that time on. None of this appears in any of Matthews’s reporting, or in DePalma’s book.

  Came April 9 and—much to Matthews’s grief—Cuba’s workers again blew a loud and collective raspberry at Fidel Castro, reporting to work en masse. “Cuba’s laborer’s always maintained a stony indifference to Fidel Castro’s movement,” admitted Cuba’s richest man and (duped) Fidel Castro bankroller Julio Lobo, who knew because he employed thousands of them.8 Lobo himself scooted out of Cuba barely ahead of a firing squad in 1960.

  With his call for a general strike, Fidel Castro was again trying to derail the forthcoming elections. The rationale for these personal calls by Herbert Matthews in March 1958 is not hard to plumb. Here was the man most likely to win a free and fair presidential election (Marquez-Sterling) and here was the head of Cuba’s largest and most powerful labor organization (Mujal). At that time, by the way, according to the International labor Organization, Cuban workers per capita were more unionized than U.S. workers. Both of these men must be coopted or neutralized, as Fidel Castro well knew.

  So Castro called his faithful retriever from The New York Times. “Heel, boy! Heel!” Then he pointed him in their direction and said, “Fetch, boy! Fetch!” All under the guise of interviews for the famous New York Times.

  That some Hispanic politicians in some banana republic not only rebuffed his entreaties but booted him from their domiciles must have shaken the worldly, tweedy, pipe-smoking Herbert Matthews, reporter for the world’s most prestigious newspaper, Polk Award Winner and friend to Ernest Hemingway. But so it came to pass.

  “He really looked shocked when my dad kicked his ass out of our house!” recalls Carlos’s son Manuel Marquez Sterling.

  About the election itself, the story is short and not-so-sweet. General elections were held on November 1, 1958. As Castro had threatened to jail and execute any candidate who took part, the only person willing to stand for the office was a Batista partisan, Andres Rivero Aguero. Batista’s flight and Castro’s coup prevented him from taking office.

  The very week Fidel and Che Guevara entered Havana, Carlos Marquez-Sterling received another visit from their men. But the ones who came this time were bearded and heavily armed. Marquez-Sterling was arrested and bundled to La Cabana prison, already filled to suffocation. This was Che Guevara’s command post and Havana’s firing-squad central. Soon it would be known as Cuba’s Lubyanka.

  Shortly Che himself—sneering as usual, reeking horribly as usual—walked into Marquez-Sterling’s cell and asked if he’d been the Cuban ambassador to his native Argentina in the 30’s and 40’s.

  No, that ambassador had been his father, Carlos explained. “I’m not exactly sure of what the charges are against you yet,” said Che. “Then Che was alerted that he had some phone calls back in his office and he walked out,” recounts Carlos’s son Manuel. “After taking these he walked back in and sneered at my father: to think that you and your politicking, you and your elections, almost derailed our revolution!”

  So here was proof—and from a pretty primary source—of Castro’s fears, and the motive for Matthews’s visits. “Though we always suspected the rationale,” says Manuel, it “was now confirmed. He was using the good and prestigious offices of a New York Times reporter to try and derail my father’s own attempted derailment of the Castro brothers’ and Che Guevara’s plans to Stalinize Cuba. To the end of his life my father considered Che’s remark one of the biggest compliments he’d ever received.”

  Further confirmation came to Argentina’s ambassador, Julio Amoedo, a few weeks later. “Marquez-Sterling was the one we feared most,” Castro confided to him. “Had he won the elections, I would not be here today.”

  So (unwittingly) from Che Guevara, Carlos Marquez-Sterling had learned of the Castroite charges against him. At a time when every media outlet and personality from The New York Times to Ed Sullivan was hailing the glories of the newly-democratic Cuba, a man was jailed for having taken part in a Cuban democratic process.

  “In fact my father was released a few days later,” says Manuel. “Che must have taken a call from someone quite high when he walked out of the cell. Remember, at the time Guevara certainly didn’t take orders from too many people in Cuba. We think the call was from Fidel himself, telling him that the immediate danger from such as Marquez-Sterling was over. So he was released and put under house arrest. A few weeks later he and my mother escaped Cuba, intent on alerting the world to what was going on behind all those media headlines and to organize a resistance in exile to what he already foresaw as the Stalinization of Cuba.”

  So despite what Matthews and all the rest were broadcasting to the world, here was early proof that Castro had no intention of allowing any elections in his new fiefdom. The immediate danger to his rule came—as it did to Stalin’s plans for Poland—from the military. “Carlos Marquez-Sterling’s turn would certainly come, but for now let’s get cracking against Cuba’s military, the outfit with guns—especially the few who showed mettle when fighting us in the hills,” Castro must have reasoned.

  So Cuba’s version of the Katyn massacre ensued. Within a few months, the bulk of the Cuban military officer-corps had been murdered by firing squad or imprisoned. Research by Armando Lago of the Cuba Archive project documented 1,168 firing-squad executions by the end of that first year of revolution, with another 5,000 Cubans (mostly professional military men) jailed for political crimes. With a few exceptions the international media echoed the Castroite line, rationalizing this reign of terror as “Nuremberg-type justice for Cuban war criminals.”

  Among the exceptions was Havana correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, Edwin Tetlow, who reported on a mass “trial” orchestrated by Che Guevara in February 1959, where the reporter noticed the death-sentences posted on a board before the trial had started.

  The January 1959 issue of Cuba’s Bohemia magazine listed a total of 898 Cubans killed on all sides of the anti-Batista violence starting in 1952. How a civil war with such casualties on both sides could produce so many war criminals on one side few reporters cared to question. Their crusading journalistic zeal of a year before, with Cuba under Batista, vanished in a poof with Cuba under Castro.

  Yet gripping human-interest stories were all around them. “I’m sworn not to violate my holy duties of confession,” sobbed a Cuban priest named Berba Beche to Gerardo Abascal in Santiago, Cuba during the early days of the revolution. Raul Castro was machine-gunning dozens of supposed war criminals into mass graves at the time but had graciously permitted Father Beche to hear the confessions from the condemned. “Who would lie upon his last confession?” asked the shaken priest to his friend Gerardo Abascal. “Why would these men lie to me? ... I can assure you that the Castroites are executing mostly innocent men.”9

  CHAPTER 7

  To Kill a Labor Leader: Manhunt in Buenos Aires

  The very week Castro took power—with everyone from Herbert Matthews to Ed Murrow and Ed Sullivan singing his praises as a “Christian humanist”—Castro’s hit-teams went after Marquez-Sterling’s partner in drafting Cuba’s social-democratic 1940 constitution. The labor leader Mujal ducked into the Argentinian embassy just in time to escape a bullet in the neck, Lubyanka and Katyn-style. Somebody with Mujal’s background, contacts and smarts might quickly let the Castroite communist cat out of the “democratic” and “humanist” bag that had been carefully sewn shut by so many in the media, starting with Herbert Matthews.

  Mujal escaped to Argentina a few days later, only to meet up with fellow Cuban Carlos Bringuier, who happened to be visiting his Argentinean in-laws at the time. Finding a countryman in a foreign port always breeds quick rapport and, though they’d never met, Bringuier and Mujal had many common acquaintances back home. “The communists have taken over in Cuba and they’re trying to murder me.” Mu
jal finally told Bringuier, who was then a 25-year-old lawyer.

  “At first I figured Mujal was a bit crazy,” recalls Bringuier, “psychotically paranoid for sure.” But twelve years earlier, University of Havana student Fidel Castro had murdered Bringuier’s cousin Manolo Castro—no relation, but a rival to him as a student leader. So Bringuier was eager to hear out the older and wiser man.1

  “I know most of the people really in power behind Castro’s façade of a democratic government.” Mujal told him. “They’re hard-core Stalinists I knew in the 30’s. I know full well they’ll now try to kill me. I’ve got to get to the U.S. where I’ll be safer. I’ve already got a U.S. visa. Can you and your in-laws help me get an exit visa from Argentina?”

  The more Bringuier spoke with Mujal the more he became convinced of everything he said—media and intelligence “experts” be damned. And here’s what the “experts” were claiming about Castro at the time:

  “We’ve infiltrated Castro’s guerrilla group in the Sierra mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara have no affiliations with any communists whatsoever.” (Havana CIA station chief Jim Noel, November 1958)2

  “Fidel Castro is not only not a communist—he’s a strong anticommunist fighter! He’s ready to help us in the hemisphere’s anti-communist fight and we should share our intelligence with him!” (Gerry Droller, the CIA’s expert on Latin American communism, April 1959)3

  “Fidel Castro is a good young man trying to do what’s best for Cuba. We should extend him a hand.” (former President Harry Truman, July 1959)4

  “Now these things [i.e., Castro is a Communist] are charged. But they are not easy to prove. The U.S. Government has made no such charges.” (U.S. President Eisenhower, July 1959)5

  More than a year and a half later, in June 1960—as Cuba crawled with Soviet agents, with Raul Castro in Moscow arranging for the delivery Soviet missiles, with Castro a mere month away from stealing more than 1,600 U.S.-owned businesses at Soviet gunpoint—a situation report by the CIA and the State Department concluded: “We are unable to answer the simplified question, Is Castro himself a Communist?”6

  Eusebio Mujal had much to teach U.S. intelligence in early 1959—if only he’d been allowed entry to the U.S. Instead, promptly upon his arrival at Miami International Airport from Argentina, Mujal’s U.S. visa was cancelled on orders of the U.S. State Department. Mujal then flew to Spain where he found asylum.

  The State Department officials in charge of Cuban matters at the time were Roy Rubottom and William Wieland. According to sworn testimony by U.S. ambassadors Arthur Gardner and Earl Smith, both of those officials worked hand in glove with The New York Times’s Herbert Matthews, who bore a grudge against Mujal. To return to the ambassadors’ testimony:

  Senator Dodd: “While you were the ambassador to Cuba, Mr. Rubottom was the assistant secretary for Latin American affairs, was he not?”

  Mr. Gardner: “Yes.”

  Mr. Smith: “I believe there was a close connection... between the Latin American desk and Herbert Matthews.”

  Mr. Sourwine: “And by the Latin American desk, whom do you mean?”

  Mr. Smith: “I would say the Latin American desk would go from the assistant secretary for Latin American affairs [Rubottom] right down to the man who presides over the Cuban [Wieland].”

  Mr Smith: “I would say that Mr. Wieland and all those who had anything to do with Cuba had a close connection with Herbert Matthews. I will go further than that. I will say that when I was ambassador, I was thoroughly aware of this, and sometimes made the remark in my own embassy that Mr. Matthews was more familiar with the State Department thinking regarding Cuba than I was.” (my emphasis)

  Senator Dodd: “You have been quoted, Mr. Gardner, as referring to ‘Castro worship’ in the State Department in 1957. You are quoted as saying you fought all the time with the State Department over whether Castro merited the support or friendship of the United States. Would you explain?

  Mr. Gardner: “I feel it very strongly, that the State Department was influenced, first, by those stories by Herbert Matthews, and soon [support for Castro] became kind of a fetish with them.”

  Senator Dodd: “Your successor as ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith was actually [sent by the State Department] to be briefed by The New York Times’ Herbert Matthews?”

  Mr. Gardner: “Yes, that is right.”

  Two years ago Obama’s communications director Anita Dunn denounced a dangerous political-media axis consisting of conservative Republicans and Fox News, the second of which served as “either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” No proof was provided by Anita Dunn.

  On the other hand, we have sworn Congressional testimony by Republican ambassadors Arthur Gardner and Earl Smith of intimate collusion by liberal State Department officials with a liberal New York Times reporter (Herbert Matthews). Partly owing to this collusion, the U.S.—in the Missile Crisis—would soon face its biggest external threat since the War of 1812. This State Department-New York Times cronyism had completely upended the traditional process. In 1957 U. S. government officials posted to Cuba got briefings and orientation from a New York Times reporter. It used to work the other way: reporters got briefings from diplomats.

  Not to be outdone, during a chat with Matthews in the fall of 1962 President Kennedy learned that the reporter was again heading to Cuba. So the president asked if Matthews would be so kind as to stop by afterwards to brief him. A week later the Missile Crisis put the kibosh to Matthews Cuba trip. But the point is that Matthews’s clairvoyance on Cuban matters (in which he now had more than five years’ experience) impressed the U.S. president.

  Cuban exiles were also getting on both Matthews’s and Kennedy’s nerves at around this time. They were sending hate-mail to The New York Times and “sensationalist rumors” about Russian missiles to the White House. For weeks dozens of young Cuban exiles had been infiltrating Cuba and bringing out eyewitness reports of Soviet missiles. In the process, dozens were also dying by firing squad and torture at the hands of Castro and Che Guevara’s KGB-tutored secret police.

  Matthews’s insight into Cuban matters in October 1962 would have probably been welcomed among “the best and the brightest.” Chances are his insights would match and confirm their own. To wit:

  “There is no evidence of any organized combat force in Cuba from any Soviet-bloc country,” stressed a public statement from President Kennedy in September 1962, “or of military bases provided to Russia or of the presence of offensive ground-to-ground missiles.”7

  “Our intelligence on this is very good and very hard,” stressed Undersecretary of State George Ball to a Congressional committee.8

  “Nothing but refugee rumors,” sneered JFK’s national security advisor McGeorge Bundy on ABC’s “Issues and Answers” on October 14, 1962. “Nothing in Cuba presents a threat to the United States,” continued the Ivy League luminary, barely masking his scorn for the hot-headed and deceitful Cuban exiles and their sensational reports of missiles. “There’s no likelihood that the Soviets or Cubans would try and install an offensive capability in Cuba,” he scoffed.

  “There’s fifty-odd-thousand Cuban refugees in this country,” sneered President Kennedy himself, “all living for the day when we go to war with Cuba. They’re the ones putting out this kind of stuff.”9 Exactly 48 hours later U-2 photos on the President’s desk revealed those refugee rumors, complete with nuclear warheads, and pointed directly at Bundy, JFK and their entire staff of sagacious Ivy League wizards—to say nothing of Herbert Matthews.

  Much of that very good and very hard intelligence had been vouchsafed to Robert Kennedy by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The setting was one of those (hush-hush, wink-wink) “back-channel” meetings for which the Soviet ambassador and the U.S. attorney general were to become famous. The irresponsible rumor-mongering from Republican Senators Keating and Goldwater about Russian missiles in Cuba had obviously reached Premier Khrushchev’s att
ention, explained Dobrynin.

  But he fully realized (wink-wink) that mid-term elections loomed in the U.S. So he fully expected those rascally Republicans (wink-wink), in light of their poor prospects and eager to affect a reversal, to engage in politics at their sleaziest. Hence their crackpot claims of Soviet missiles in Cuba, accompanied by tens of thousands of fully-armed Soviet troops.

  Robert Kennedy assured Dobrynin that the president (wink-wink) was an old hand at this type of thing. He knew full well what the Republicans were up to and saw right through their scam. Soviet Premier Khrushchev need not worry. In the November elections the rascally Republican scare-mongers (wink-wink) would get their comeuppance, and all would return to normal.

  In sum: eyewitness reports regarding Soviet missiles from men dodging Soviet patrols and risking death from Soviet-armed firing squads were poo-poohed as unreliably biased. Instead the president of the U.S.—to confirm his “back-channel” scoop from a Soviet ambassador originally appointed by Stalin—sought out a presumably unbiased report regarding Soviet intentions. For this he chose a man whom a Soviet satrap had personally decorated with a medal inscribed, “To Our American Friend Herbert Matthews with Gratitude. Fidel Castro.” In addition, the FBI had been monitoring this (presumably unbiased) man for three years. “One can’t get much closer to communism without becoming one,” J. Edgar Hoover had written Vice President Nixon about Herbert Matthews in July of 1959.10

  After Carlos Bringuier and his in-laws had secured Eusebio Mujal’s exit-visa from Argentina, the labor leader asked that Bringuier discreetly drive him to the airport—and in disguise. “If I take a taxi, Castro’s hit-team will get me before I reach the airport,” Mujal explained.

  “Again I thought Mujal was exaggerating,” recalls Bringuier. “‘Drama queen’ wasn’t a term used in those days, but that’s pretty much what I thought at the time. Regardless, we followed all his instructions and got him safely to his flight to Miami.